Paradise...

My apologies to my followers (both of you) for my long delay in blogging. I hate to admit defeat. I gave up on Five Germanys. Sorry, Dr. Stern. Honestly, I tried to finish reading the book but I just lost interest in it. I thought it was going to be a kind of eye-witness account of war time Germany, and it was until Stern and his family moved to the U.S. when he was a teenager and his story became less historical and more conjectural. So...I've started another Michener novel: Hawaii. It begins in typical Michener fashion with the formation of the land out of the boundless deep. Did you know that the Pacific Ocean covers almost 1/3 of the earth's total surface? This is 64 million square miles. Its average depth is 14,000 feet, or about 2 1/2 miles. About 25,000 islands are scattered throughout its expanse, most of them south of the equator. Michener gained intimate knowledge of the south Pacific during his service as a lieutenant commander in the USN during the 2nd World War, hence his breakthrough novel Tales of the South Pacific published in 1947. Once the islands are formed, a tortuous process of birth, destruction and rebirth encompassing "millions upon millions of years" (page 3), the human story begins with a small band of Maori tribesman on the island of Bora Bora sometime during the 9th century C.E. The tribal leader and divinely appointed "king", Tamatoa and his rebellious, hot-headed brother Teroro are engaged in a power struggle with the neighboring tribesman of Tahiti. The spiritual leaders of Tahiti have introduced a new god, Oro and are attempting to enforce strict observance of this new god over the worship of the islander's traditional god, Tane and thus secure their territorial influence. Both traditions engage in the brutal Kapu system of human sacrifice, but the worshipers of the new Oro have embellished the practice with added cruelties. The Bora Borans have grown increasingly opposed to these sacrificial rites and rightfully suspicious of the Tahitians use of such tactics to intimidate the villagers. Tribal warfare ensues and eventually Tamatoa decides that the Bora Borans must flee their home island in order to avoid extermination by the worshipers of Oro. From here, Michener chronicles their migration from Bora Bora to the chain of volcanic islands north of the equator that we know as Hawaii. Tamatoa, Teroro and about 60 islanders embark on a harrowing, 2,000 mile trek on the open sea in a waka taua: a double-hulled, twin mast canoe named Wait-for-the-West-Wind. Michener makes it clear in his dedication of the book that all of this is pure fiction, but it "remains true to the spirit and history of Hawaii". His version of the Maori migration may be loosely based on the island folk tale of Kupe, or other Polynesian mythologies. Teroro, captain and navigator of the West Wind uses only the constellations to guide the refugees to their future home. They nearly starve to death in route, but miraculously arrive at Havaiki-of-the-Manifold-Riches (page 105), establish a settlement and prosper. Then strangely, the story jumps to the 19th century, bypassing 1000 years of history and not even mentioning the landing of James Cook in Hawaii in 1778. I thought this was a bit uncharacteristic for Michener who was such a meticulous historian. This novel was first published in 1959, fairly early in Michener's career so it was probably his editor's fault, thinking the book would sell better if it were shorter and thus carving out the more tedious parts of the story. That would be unfortunate. At any rate, chapter 3 takes up the saga in the farm village of Marlboro, Massachusetts and a young, Yale divinity student named Abner Hale. I don't know if this is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the Revoluntionary War spy and Yale prototype ideal Nathan Hale, or not. Abner certainly doesn't come from an aristocratic family, nor is he handsome or especially gifted, but will he emerge as a hero? We shall see...